During August or September of 2013 Jon Stewart‘s Rosewater (set to premiere next month in Toronto, possibly also in Telluride) shot footage in Jordan, and in preparation for this costumer Phaedra Dadaleh, a well-established professional in that region, was hired. On 9.11.13 Dadaleh told a Rosewater promotional site that she was “nervous” meeting Stewart, but her concerns quickly evaporated. “He’s just the most amazing, friendly, down-to-earth kind of guy,” she said. “He just got up, gave me a big hug and immediately made me feel at ease.”

Rosewater director-writer Jon Stewart, costumer Phaedra Dahdelah during filming in Jordan last year.

That’s cool, Phaedra, and good for you, Jon. But people on movie sets have been saying the exact same thing about major above-the-line types for at least a century if not longer, and they never get tired of saying it. Time marches on and they just won’t stop wetting their pants when name-brand people are as kind and gracious and friendly to them as regular Joes are to each other in the outside world. It’s always “I was afraid this famous hotshot might be brusque or snide or otherwise a dick or a bitch, but he/she was totally the opposite…and he/she made me feel so good.” I know the feeling, and I’m not saying that that many bigtime above-the-liners — Jon Stewart among them, I’m sure — aren’t really nice to begin with. But one of the main reasons that bigtime showbiz types have made it to the top is that they’re really good — practiced — at putting on that warm, kind and affectionate face when the situation calls for it.

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I wasn’t invited to the Guardians of the Galaxy all-media, and I forgot to politely beg Disney to allow me to see it beforehand (they usually oblige if I get down on my knees) so I really shouldn’t say anything until I catch it this weekend. (77% on Metacritic, 92% on Rotten Tomatoes as we speak.) But the news about last night’s $11.2 million haul — the biggest pre-opening total of the year — has hit me two ways. The upside is that it’s obviously great when a movie really hits the bull’s-eye and becomes a cultural and conversational necessity to see. The downside is that American lowbrows have once again told Hollywood loud and clear to keep cranking out CG-driven, jokey-ass comic-book movies about unlikely superheroes doing spectacular things and…you know, whizzing around in CG-land. Thank you very fucking much. The downward aspirations of American mainstream cinema have just been handsomely rewarded, the non-Catholic zombies who are in the movie business for what they can siphon out of it are now cackling and flexing their muscles all the more, and the struggle to produce quality-aspiring, human-scale theatrical fare has just gotten that much harder. Congratulations, American megaplex ass-clowns, for doing your part in the great ongoing effort to nudge American movie culture in a downmarket direction and…you know, another notch or two down the reverse-evolutionary (or devolutionary) scale.

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Jennifer Aniston is one of the producers of the Toronto-bound Cake, a somewhat dark-toned, lower-budgeted drama, shot last spring in Los Angeles, in which she, Anna Kendrick, Sam Worthington and Chris Messina costar. It has to do with tragedy, morose moods, a pain-support group, a sudden departure, a mildly unattractive mousey appearance for Aniston and (here’s hoping) acerbic dialogue. Aniston occasionally steps outside her comedic comfort zone to make films of this sort (Life of Crime, Friends With Money, etc.), the difference being that this time she helped with the financing. Please don’t get me wrong — I admire Aniston for trying to expand her repertoire, and I intend to give Cake a chance. As much as I’m able to, I mean.

Jennifer Aniston with prosthetic cheek scar during filming of Cake earlier this year.

The problem is that I have an Aniston blockage. I’d like to submit to the idea of Aniston playing a dumpy, brown-haired downhead, but I just can’t. And it’s not because she’s worth around $150 million or something in that vicinity. Nothing wrong with Aniston being loaded, but I can’t quite do that suspension-of-disbelief thing. Not with her super-toned bod and frosted blonde hair and her SmartWater and Aveeno endorsement deals, and her unrelenting presence in the supermarket tabloids for the last…what, 15 years? And always with the hot-bikini vacations on the Mexican coast.

In my mind Aniston is right next door to Blake Lively in the soul department. She’s a personality, a light comedienne, a world-famous metaphor for the 21st Century jilted woman, a marketing concept. And I just can’t see her as a mousey depressive dealing with pain and death and trips to Mexico. I’ll follow Amy Adams or Jessica Chastain or even Anne Hathaway into this realm, but Aniston presents an obstruction. Not that I wouldn’t like to. I just feel constrained.

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It would appear that Jon Stewart‘s Rosewater (Open Road, 11.7) is basically another ordeal film, perhaps not precisely in the vein of Unbroken or All Is Lost or Life of Pi as it’s about jail rather than the open sea, although it’s close enough as Unbroken also deals with agonizing conditions in a Japanese P.O.W. camp. Directed and written by Stewart and produced by Scott Rudin, pic is based on a first-hand account of BBC journalist Maziar Bahari (played by Gael Garcia Bernal in the film) and the 118 days he spent in an Iranian prison in ’09 on trumped-up charges. Bahari’s book about the experience is called “Then They Came For Me: A Family’s Story Of Love, Captivity And Survival.” Bahari’s Revolutionary Guard interrogator, a man known as “Rosewater,” is played in the film by Kim Bodnia. As Rosewater will play the Toronto Film festival as a Canadian premiere, I’m presuming it’ll appear first in Telluride.

Thanks to Awards Daily‘s Ryan Adams for posting an Easy Lay, Non-Discretionary List of 2014 Best Actress Contenders…31 in all. Nice effort, a good start. But let’s cut out the chaff and get real. By current HE spitball standards there are seven female performances that may potentially shake out as highly likely or distinctly possible contenders within two or three months. Topping the list are Wild‘s Reese Witherspoon, Eleanor Rigby and Miss Julie‘s Jessica Chastain and Gone Girl‘s Rosamund Pike.

I obviously know next to nothing about who’s really hot-tub but (a) I do know which roles appear to be the most substantial and awards-baity on paper, (b) I would be floored if Witherspoon, Chastain and Pike are not part of the Best Actress conversation by mid-October, (c) I do know which actresses have built up good cred and are “owed,” so to speak, and (d) I do have a fairly acute intuition about which performances are almost certain to be ignored. Here’s how it seems right now:

Highly Likely: Reese Witherspoon, Wild; Jessica Chastain, Eleanor Rigby + Miss Julie; Rosamund Pike, Gone Girl.

Distinctly Possible but don’t bet the farm: Felicity Jones, The Theory of Everything; Emma Stone, Birdman (supporting); Michelle Williams, Suite Française; Amy Adams, Big Eyes; Julianne Moore, Maps to the Stars.

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This international Birdman trailer is an uptick. Potent emotional currents, casual-natural acting, withering God’s-eye humor as opposed to “laughs”, an apparently noteworthy Emma Stone performance. But what’s with Michael Keaton‘s Tom Waits voice? And what’s with the non-stop running around with Fruit of the Loom underwear, at least as far as this trailer is concerned? Underwear, underwear, genital-revealing underwear under the glare of Times Square….I’ve got it, thank you. Yes, it’s a metaphor but in my eyes Fruit of the Loom is pretty close to gold-toe socks in terms of aesthetic offense. The world of men’s underwear is pretty cool these days. I personally lean toward slim boxer underwear with a button-snap fly. Nobody with a shred of taste or self-respect wears Fruit of the Loom briefs, least of all anyone allowing for the possibility that they might wear them in public.

Last week a staunch Democrat muttered that people shouldn’t even talk about Elizabeth Warren running against Hillary Clinton in 2016. Warren will just fuck things up by weakening support for Clinton and might thereby allow for a possible Republican presidential victory. I only know that a presidential campaign has to be about something more than just “I’ve been biding my time and am pretty much inevitable” and “it’s time for a woman to be in the Oval Office.” I agree with both notions but a presidential campaign has to be about real heart and extra-passionate beliefs, and Clinton seems to barely have either (her main conviction is that she wants very much to win) while Warren has both in spades. You know she does, and you know that Hillary, a corporate center-rightist with nominally “liberal” colors, has never had that fire.

Will Hillary be nominated and elected? Most likely, yes, and that’ll be a lot better than Rand Paul or whomever. And it’ll be good to have Bill Clinton back in the hot seat and co-running the show.

But Clinton can’t just be coronated. She has to lay it on the line and show what she’s philosophically made of and and duke it out on the mat. At the very least a Warren debate will force Clinton to take a more populist tack. It might make real common sense at the end of the day for Democrats to go with a Granny Ticket. Seriously.

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Disney marketers are selling the mythical storybook sizzle — witches, spooky woods, maidens, spells, beanstalks, a handsome prince, “I wish…” — and sidestepping the incidental fact that Rob Marshall‘s Into The Woods (Disney, 12.25) is given to song, and more particularly to the unconventional, occasionally quite subtle and sophisticated super-songs of Stephen Sondheim. Hilarious! Disney marketers are essentially declaring that the idiots out there don’t know from Sondheim and are probably going to be turned off by any notion of melodic fancy but the spooky storybook stuff…yes! We’ll eventually let them know it’s a musical down the road, Disney is thinking. Gently, gradually, bit by little bit. Hit them with it too suddenly and they might freak or complain.

Meryl Streep, Anna Kendrick and James Corden can belt out a tune quite robustly and professionally, of course. I’m hoping/presuming/praying that Emily Blunt, Chris Pine, Tracey Ullman, Christine Baranski and Johnny Depp will somehow muddle through. We all know that in terms of his directing style Marshall is a brassy, straight-ahead square who would rather strangle himself than play to the sophistos — he makes movies for popcorn-eaters. Chicago was certainly proof enough of that. But if he just gets out of the way of the material and just captures the play and the music and leaves well enough alone, Into The Woods might work.

After a slow-if-not-difficult day with the column and all kinds of niggly-piggly chickenshit matters that I had to attend to above and beyond, I didn’t feel like submitting to Sharknado 2 last night. Just another cash-in — the original was the charm. I had to hop on the non-hog (i.e., Yamaha 400 cc Majesty) and buzz around town. You don’t go any one special place…that’s cornball style, you just go. Okay, I went to one special place (Amoeba) and then into the hills in order to not feel the glorious sensation of wind blowing through my hair because I’m required to wear a helmet that makes my head feel warm and somewhat damp. I’ll catch the encore showing on Saturday, 8.2. But in the meantime this extra-particular complaint by Vulture‘s John Sellers is 65% hilarious and 35% something else.

There’s no question that Chadwick Boseman‘s performance as James Brown is the best thing about Tate Taylor‘s Get On Up. The film has other pleasures but Boseman matters most. He was naturally obliged to play it solemn and reserved as Jackie Robinson in 42, but not as the late soul-funk legend, who was nothing if not irascible in a gifted sort of way. This is a snappy, raspy, rapscallion submission that never softpedals or seems to be the least bit concerned about whether whitebread types will “like” the character or not. Honestly? Boseman’s Brown is not 100% likable…and that, for me, is where the integrity comes in. Boseman has absolutely earned himself an armchair at the 2014 Best Actor table. By giving himself, monk-like, to Brown’s spirit, history and rambunctious energy, he’s gotten up offa that thing and lit some kind of fuse.

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On top of HE’s 26 “hard” picks for the Toronto Film Festival (or 30 if you want to be liberal about it) I’ll probably be adding one more — Ted Melfi and Bill Murray‘s St. Vincent (formerly St. Vincent de Van Nuys), which the Weinstein Co,. is opening on 10.24. The idea is to give the New York-based attitude comedy, which costars Murray, Melissa McCarthy, Chris O’Dowd and Naomi Watts, a gala screening during the festival’s first weekend. Earlier today Deadline‘s Michael Fleming wrote that the Weinsteiners were having trouble getting Murray to commit to the Toronto thing, presumably because Harvey sees real potential in a Best Actor campaign for Murray, who was totally shat upon 15 and 1/2 years ago when the Academy didn’t even nominate him for his legendary performance in Wes Anderson‘s Rushmore. And then he lost his expected Lost in Translation Best Actor Oscar to Sean Penn in Mystic River.

Interstellar‘s trippy space-travel, visiting-Iceland footage is well and good, but, as previously noted, the cloying emotionalism in the scenes between Matthew McConaughey (whom I’ve suddenly tired of) and his teary-eyed kids as they discuss his pending voyage is really starting to grate. And I really don’t think it’s possible to roll with Michael Caine as someone else any more — he’s been imitated to death and every time he opens his mouth you can’t help but think about Rob Brydon. The key image in this brand-new trailer, which was shown for the first time three or four days ago at ComicCon, is what I’m presuming is some kind of visualization of a wormhole. It looks to me like an overhead shot of a looping Santa Monica Freeway off-ramp covered in glowing butterscotch sauce and transposed to space.